Facebook Lately I've been checking the facebook site after an invitation from César Salazar. It looks nice but it is also a strange thing, coming from Caracas and all that.

Because Facebook is actually a digital form of a yearbook, where you can find your friends or colleagues from your school time and keep up to date with them. Among other things.

First, we didn't have a yearbook back then in Caracas. Or a fraternity. Those are things that come out in other places. Perhaps we have other ways of understanding our relation with friends, and other ways of establishing line of traditions.

Anyway, I accepted César's invitation and now I am also in Facebook. I have three friends so far. I don't belong to any network so far. I see César's foto's and friends, videos and all kind of things. Coming from a Public High School in Caracas, I don't see many friends from my "yearbook".

One starts to think again about the circle of friends. Or the circles of friends. Concentric, excentric, centrifugal, centripetal. Non-local networks.

Do we want everyone to know everyone? Our silly friends mingling with our brainy friends?

Labels: caracas, césar salazar, facebook, friends

  ¶ 8/28/2007 04:22:00 PM 0 comments

  Dive

This summer we have taken things a little bit easy. We haven't taken long holiday trips, just the usual regatta's with the Altopana, and weekend trips. Most of the time, if is good weather, we invite friends or family to go with us to the boat and spend a day or a weekend. Margreet and I spend almost always a couples of days on the boat.

Margreet has a different role this time: she stays at the cockpit, steering the boat while I do all the things that are needed to sail or dock the boat. That means, sail sets, sail drops, jumping to the docks, getting the docking lines, etc.

When we are at one of the islands at the Grevelingen lake, I always do as my old friends back in Los Roques (Venezuela) did. I make sure I'm the only one who drops the ladder in the water. The sign that we have arrived and that work (sailing) is over and that we are about to enjoy the day in a different way. That "plop" sound belongs to me. Just the same as it belonged to Edwin Otero on the Olafo, back then and there in Los Roques.

Then I dive from the deck into the water. Just like Jose Alejandro Santana, a good old friend of mine, did in Los Roques, La Orchila, Puerto La Cruz, Purto Frances, and all those places.

Do I choose to do those things out of nostalgia, tradition of some kind of connection?

Labels: altopana, Margreet, sailing

  ¶ 8/21/2007 10:37:00 AM 0 comments